Bruce McNall: Fall of the Collector

Shirley and Earl McNall knew they had one hot little entrepreneur on their hands. Son Bruce was only five, and he could wipe everybody out at the Monopoly board, building hotels on all the expensive properties, leaving his mom stewing with an empty lot, say, on low-rent Baltic Avenue. Dazzled, the mother, a lab technician, and the father, a biochemistry professor at the University of Southern California, rationed Bruce’s television watching and showered him with intellectual goodies.

The pampering paid off. Bruce became a wealthy coin collector while still in his teens. Then he collected a hockey team, collected a football team, collected race horses, collected Rolls-Royces and five residences and a private jet and well-placed friends — collected, all told, a worldwide reputation as an expert in antiquities, a nice guy, a canny businessman and a fine judge of athletes and horseflesh.

Now McNall, 44, stands to collect a prison sentence that could run up to nine years in the worst case. As early as this week, McNall is expected to plead guilty to four federal counts charging him with bank fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy. Two of his associates have already been accused of defrauding banks and other creditors, fleecing investors of more than $138 million by falsifying financial statements, setting up phony companies to hide assets and securing loans with fictitious collateral. Last month three others pleaded guilty to wire-fraud charges.

What’s left of McNall’s empire is a shambles. According to bankruptcy-court filings, McNall owes Credit Lyonnais $121 million, the Bank of America $40 million and Merrill Lynch $37 million. What remains of his traceable fortune is in hock. Gone are a couple of his houses, gone his private jet and a few cars, his hockey team, his football team and his stake in a movie company. His coin business is in legal limbo. Creditors are queuing up to sue him. Soon McNall, the former boy tycoon, may not have an old — or even a plugged — drachma to call his own.

It was his passion for coins that did him in. Early on, his hobby blossomed into a fascination with antiquity. McNall even went so far as to enroll in the graduate program in ancient history at UCLA. But he did not stay long enough to learn how fate exacts a terrible price for hubris. Before long he was traveling the ancient trade routes, striking coup after coup. In 1974, when the record price for an ancient coin was about $100,000, he bought the rarest of them all, the 5th century B.C. Athena decadrachm, for a seemingly outlandish $420,000. But within the week he sold it for $470,000. That same year he opened a coin shop on tony Rodeo Drive in the heart of Hollywood.

McNall began trading in artifacts, many of them stolen by tomb robbers in Turkey, Greece and Italy. To a Vanity Fair reporter last spring, he freely boasted of dealing in contraband (at 18, he said, he was smuggling gold coins) — and if caught at it, quickly returning it. “What I don’t need to have happen,” he explained, “is my academic friends saying, ‘You know, deep down morally these things are stolen.’ And I do know that … I tell all my people, ‘If there’s a whisper, give it back.’ ” McNall now prefers not even to whisper to the press.

The money rolled in; McNall rolled on. Here racehorses, there silver trading with Nelson Bunker Hunt. In 1988 McNall bought a money-losing hockey team, the languishing Los Angeles Kings, and boosted ticket sales by luring the great Wayne Gretzky for $15 million. He bought the Toronto Argonauts with Gretzky and comedian John Candy, and for $14 million signed Notre Dame wide receiver Raghib Ismail; this too paid off in attendance and TV contracts.

Meanwhile, McNall was spending drachmas as if he had his own tombful, except that the treasure was not his to spend, belonging as it did to his investors and creditors. “Enjoy it while you can,” he said.

“I have yet to see a Brink’s truck following a hearse.” Smitten by his swath and style, bankers fairly begged him to borrow their money; Merrill Lynch created three coin-trading funds for him to manage. McNall set up a bogus horse-appraisal firm, listing his chauffeur as owner and appraiser.

It couldn’t last. Lately, his sports enterprises were no longer making big money, and the coin trade was ailing. Creditors called, and McNall scrambled for money. His associates began playing shell games with his various “companies,” faking coin sales, borrowing from one bank loan to pay on another. The Merrill Lynch funds crumbled, obliging the company to cough up perhaps as much as $30 million in compensation to 3,500 investors and leading the fbi to investigate the disappearance of $3.3 million in coins from one of the funds. Having learned from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, that McNall had a certain familiarity with the smuggling trade, federal officials began looking more broadly into his books and found his tangled web.

From jail, the irrepressible faker can be expected to spend his leisure time discoursing to rapt fellow prisoners on his fabulous finagles, the reform policies of the Emperor Augustus and the spellbinding saga of the Honus Wagner baseball card with the $400,000 price tag. Betweentimes he can play Monopoly and catch up on his television. And when he gets out, he may be invited to lecture on collectibles at UCLA.